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Ever since I got my Breville Smart Oven Air, I have been in love. This thing is no ordinary toaster oven. Now, I don’t want to sound like a commercial here, but it seriously is amazing! We hardly ever use our full size oven because this thing does everything the big oven can do, but better. The only thing I can’t do is make larger batches of cookies in it, but other that – it rocks!
It fits a full size 13×9 pan in it too, so cakes, brownies, heck, even roasting a full chicken in it is easy! And it’s super simple to use! You just turn the knob to the cook type you want, set the temperature and time and start. I also love that it turns itself off after the cook time has completed. So you don’t have to worry about it staying on or anything. So simple!
I’ve tried every feature on it that it has – bake, toast, broil, air fry, etc, but I hadn’t tried the dehydrate feature until last week.
My dad has three blood orange trees that absolutely went nuts this year. He takes in bucketfuls of oranges everyday, juices them, strains the pulp from it, and freezes it. I can’t tell you how many gallons of blood orange juice is in their freezer! But until this week, we never knew what to do with the pulp. With that many oranges, it’s a lot of pulp that we go through.
This past week, I decided to try out that dehydrator setting on my Breville. I put parchment paper on the air fryer basket, poured in the pulp, and set the oven. That’s it. No additional ingredients. Nothing extra. Just delicious blood orange goodness. A few hours later, we had these delicious fruit snacks that didn’t last anywhere near the amount of time it took to cook the things. But they were worth it.
So now we have something to use the pulp for. Now, I know that not everyone has a million orange trees to get fresh juice and pulp from, so I’ve included the recipe here for how to make fruit leather using any kind of fruit. Happy dehydrating!
Homemade Fruit Leather
Ingredients
- 2 cups fresh fruit (raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, etc)
- 3 tbsp white sugar
- 1/2 lemon juiced
Instructions
- Blend the fruit, sugar and lemon juice until well blended and smooth.
- If desired, line the food dehydrator fruit tray with parchment paper. Spread the fruit mixture evenly across the fruit dehydrator tray.
- Put on the lid and set the food dehydrator to 140F (or the Breville automatically sets it to 125 and that was fine too)
- The dehyrating time varies depending on the fruit and can be anywhere from 4-12 hours. It is done when the fruit is leather and no longer sticky to the touch.
- Cut into individual portions and roll up in parchment paper. Store in the fridge in an airtight container.
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